Loving Grace Hanson
by The Devil Wears Miu Miu
Summary: In which the roles are reversed. Grace and Frankie fall in love and leave Robert and Sol for each other,


The one person who never could love Grace Hanson is me. Oh, I can put on a great show. I can laugh loudly (but not too loudly, for that would be unladylike), I can talk to everyone, look like a Hollywood actress on promotion tour and put on my face. An arrogant face, that says I'm better, and I only wish that I could truly believe that myself. But I have never loved myself and if you haven't learnt how to love yourself as a child, it is difficult to ever do.

Love is illusive or so they say. I truly believe that it is. It is difficult to fall in love with someone, to truly fall because the people that could evoke that feeling in you don't crowd the parties of your life. There is not many people that you could fall for and perhaps there is only ever one per lifetime. Wouldn't that be sad? Wouldn't that be dreary? Wouldn't it be wonderful if it worked?

I have ever only ever fallen once and it came late in life. It is easy to fall in love because when I did finally fall, there was nothing else. There was no control, no little steps. When I knew that I had fallen in love, I knew that it was bigger than everything and something that I could never get rid of for life. A great love one would call that, perhaps, but I won't because I haven't had any small ones. This love was easy in the sense that there was no question about it in my mind, no fight. There is no repulsion for anything anymore and I say this as a person who has spent life feeling repulsed by so many things.

The love that has been and remains to a large extent illusive is love for myself. I just don't know how to do it – love myself – I never have. I must have, when I was a little child, before I became aware and my parents destroyed all that must have been there.

Alcohol and I began early on in my life but no – I know what you're thinking – not _that_ early. It started at the age of 21 when it was perfectly legal because that's the kind of good girl I was. Like a love affair it began slowly. At the beginning, it was just a glass of wine when with company. Then it was one in the evenings when without. An Irish coffee for breakfast or baileys on a winter afternoon for dessert. Whiskey when things were really bad. Vodka? No, actually. That came much later and you know why. Little calories, doesn't smell. Am I an alcoholic? Yes, but for someone like me there just wasn't a line.

The line was crossed the first time I got really drunk in college. I hadn't been one of those children who are eager to try alcohol, pouring over tiramisu, which has little alcohol content but is the only form through which they'll be allowed. I wasn't the 13-year-old-girl taking a sip from mommy's champagne glass when she felt lenient at a party or the 15-year-old who gleefully took the half-filled glass of white she was finally allowed when it was daddy's birthday and half of Southampton was at her house. Oh, I could have but I didn't want to. I thought alcohol was disgusting and I didn't yet see the confidence it gave you.

 _Will you take Robert Hanson to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish_ – I almost threw up at the sycophancy of the words – _till death do you part?_ It was 12pm, I was drunk on vodka martini and I said yes. I considered his face, saw the mouth that I might want to kiss despite not _dying_ to and I said yes. I thought I might as well – experience something, feel something, live something.

It's not that I had never kissed him before but in that moment I couldn't remember it. It seemed like a first kiss and if I said yes, I would get to try.

Let's not speak of my wedding dress, Chanel and inspired by Jackie Kennedy's. Let's not speak of my perfect hair or my perfect cake or my perfectly tasteful table ornaments. Let's not talk about my little curly-haired flower girls with cherry mouths who dreamed of being me one day. Me. A doll, a thing, a wife, a model.

But let's go back from Southampton to Tulane. I was unmarried then but happy I was not. I rarely have been but that's another story. I had always had this fear that if I got really drunk, I would end up in hospital almost dead. But when it happened and I didn't, a border had been crossed and bottles of wine instead of glasses beckoned. Imagine that, I _could_ drink a whole bottle and not die. I could drink a bottle, talk to everyone about everything, feel like the world was my catwalk and dance at the heart of the party.

Iced tea was exchanged for Long Island and that was that.


End file.
